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On the announcement stream, they talked about how this new technology would still scale to any device, from PC to PS5 down to Android and iOS devices, so the hardware requirements might not be as insane as you think.

I'm more impressed by the high-quality, fully dynamic lighting. If that works as advertised, we'll presumably never have to spend hours baking lighting again, and we can also say goodbye to dynamic shadows looking significantly worse than baked ones.

The other huge announcement from Epic today, which has been somewhat overshadowed by that impressive trailer, is that they're now waiving the Unreal Engine 5% licence fee for games that earn under $1 million.
Which basically means that none of us will ever have to pay any licence fees for using it.

One thing's for sure, a lot of us are gonna have to upgrade our graphics cards and/or processors here soon.

For next-gen games, sure. But there's more to it than that.

You know all those zillions of textures strewn around and no interstitial loading screens between areas? That's the SSD. Now that's no biggie, we've got SSDs in our PCs, but apparently the PS5's SSD is proprietary tech that has faster throughput than anything in the PC space. Apparently anywhere between 5-9 Gb/sec, that top speed is something PC SSDs have yet to reach.*

Having said that, given that most games on PC will be multiplatform anyway, and the XSX (ugh, these names) has a conventional SSD in it, they'll probably be optimised to expect that as the lowest level of throughput.

*Though you could put a bunch of SSDs in a RAID configuration, which is... probably overkill.

Last edited by Sulphur; 14th May 2020 at 00:11.
Reason: bits, not bytes

Apparently anywhere between 5-9 Gb/sec, that top speed is something PC SSDs have yet to reach.

5.5GBps is its max read speed, and yeah, there isn't anything currently on the PC that can match that. Some of the fastest NVMe PCI-e SSDs (olol) can get in about the same ballpark as what the PS5 is sporting, being able to read upwards 3.5GBps, but still, it feels like they're about a generation behind what Sony's offering.

There's also Intel's Optane memory to consider, though I've never been exactly sure what that is. It's like a super fast low latency RAM cache that can also act as storage in a pinch, but...not quite that. I don't really know what it's useful for.

Last edited by Renzatic; 14th May 2020 at 13:38.
Reason: GRAMR BE GOOD TO DO GOOD

The other huge announcement from Epic today, which has been somewhat overshadowed by that impressive trailer, is that they're now waiving the Unreal Engine 5% licence fee for games that earn under $1 million. Which basically means that none of us will ever have to pay any licence fees for using it.

I posted over in the VR headset thread recently, and I'll copy some of what i said over there to put it here too:

I've been working on my own VR projects for a long time now, with ideas coming and going and re-combining. My current project is finally coming along well enough that I'm close to maybe having a real, playable alpha demo of one level for the Oculus Quest. Anyone here interested in testing it for me in the near future?

I should warn, it's a somewhat intense VR experience, because it does have a lot of locomotion (but not anything too too extreme).

I don't have it quite ready to share (and even when it is ready, it will be no-frills and have placeholder graphics) but I wanted to put the feelers out. I have a soft-spot for TTLG as a long-time Thief fan, so this is the first place I thought about sharing it, even if there aren't a lot of VR junkies here...

The game is inspired by the classic Tomb Raider games with some other inspirations mixed in. It's mostly about traversing the levels with a bunch of different kinds of movement, mostly based on (hopefully) intuitive hand movements: running and jumping, climbing, swimming, and a bunch of other things that I won't spoil. The analog sticks are only needed for turning (for now) and moving sideways or backwards (until/unless I find intuitive ways to do those with hand movement). Hand grips are used to grab things but that isn't even always necessary. No other button presses are needed.

The player's reach is important, so the game actually scales entirely to the player's height (if you're seated, it thinks you're very short and scales you up).

For seated play (once I add that as a viable option), you would need to be able to move your arms freely, including at your sides.

I was very happy that Half-Life: Alyx had hands that are always solid in the world, as I find that much more interesting than ghost hands that pass through everything. That's what my game has too.

Yakoob – these are multiple wall panels. They're using the same tiling material, and have no seams in unlit mode, but lightmapping makes them look like that. I think I had similar issue in UE3, but can't remember how I resolved it.

I've been working on my next game, a turn-based tactics game that's sort of a cross between the Gold Box games, Guild Wars, and Slay the Spire. I'd love to hear some feedback!!

To start with the pixel aesthetic is super cool, as we Americans say.

Constructive feedback:
The zombies aren't as well developed as the other icons.

The perspective is also inconsistent between top down and 3/4 perspective.
I can understand the competing demands here. If I had to give advice, it would be to do it like Binding of Issac, which is it's 3D-ish top down, as in the player sees the bottom side of the top wall and pillars at the top of the screen, the top side of the bottom wall and pillars at the bottom of the screen, the lefthand side of the right wall and right hand pillars, and right hand side of the left wall and left pillars. And the floor itself is the same non-distorted squares. It's easier to just tell you to look at screenshots of Binding of Issac. It's another good reference point because the characters in BoI also don't change perspective walking around the map. So I think it'd works with the way these icons are working too. This isn't a big deal though; and I wouldn't call it a mistake, but an aesthetic choice. But I think I might jive with it better if it were like I described it. Anyway I'd want to see how it looks that way.

Thanks, I hear what you mean. Today I tried doing a mockup with the Binding of Isaac type perspective but it's pretty tricky and nothing was turning out well. I'm wondering if either of these mockups look better?